


I thought I caught your scent on the edge of the breeze just now

by surgicalstainless



Series: if I weren't miles away [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky is actually Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fic, Epistolary, Letters, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam and Natasha are bros, Ships in every direction you care to squint, Steve Rogers-centric, Steve is teetering towards his thoroughly well-earned breakdown, Steve really needs an actual therapist, but is in the tags due to contractual obligations, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 06:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1768822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surgicalstainless/pseuds/surgicalstainless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a tenet central to rescue work that you help yourself before you attempt to help others. You can't help anyone, the logic goes, if you need rescuing yourself.</p><p>Steve is lost and lonely, swamped by his own depression, grief and PTSD. He <em>should</em> be going after Bucky, but...</p><p>(Steve writes Bucky letters.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I thought I caught your scent on the edge of the breeze just now

In the days and weeks after the helicarriers fell, Steve tried to find a balance.

In his old apartment, back before the war, he'd had this table. It was beat up, its paint scored and chipped, but it had been solid and cheap, and Bucky had helped him carry it up all the stairs. Steve liked that table; it was well-made. It never wobbled, until one day it did.

One day he'd sat down to draw and the table shifted under him, and the movement was a shock. He'd got down on his hands and knees to look at the offending leg. Up close, it was clear that _someone_ had carefully sawed off a quarter-inch of wood. There were the ragged edges, fresh-cut and unpainted. From that distance he could even smell the sawdust. Such a subtle thing, to make so much difference.

(He'd never said anything to Bucky about it. Hadn't wanted to give the asshole the satisfaction. He'd just folded a couple of his 4F enlistment forms up real small, and wedged them in the gap. It was nice to know they were doing some good.)

In the days and weeks after the helicarriers fell, he thought a lot about that table.

It seemed like suddenly, every solid thing he'd ever been used to leaning on had a wobble. SHIELD, gone. HYDRA, risen from its ashes. The old secrets were in the news, and new secrets had rushed in to take their place. Natasha, with her youthful face and old eyes, was in the wind. Even his memories weren't as true as he'd thought they were.

Everyone gave him the same advice: "Be careful. Be patient. Only wait for the dust to settle before you charge into another battle."

But the dust didn't settle. In Steve's experience, it never would.

____

He got text messages, sporadically, from Natasha. Each text came from a different number, signed with a new name, and often in an unfamiliar language. She made jokes, in the texts he could understand, and made faces out of punctuation. The ones he couldn't understand, he showed to Sam, who laughed at him and then showed him how to use Google Translate.

She was doing okay; that was the message. She was off-balance too, still searching for a new cover, but she was okay. Steve saved all her text messages, even though she'd have told him not to.

____

Sam let him crash at his place for a while after he got out of the hospital. Sam, the soldier, the stranger he'd met in the park, just opened up his home to Steve like it was a matter of course. Steve tagged along on Sam's morning runs (until Sam growled at him to "get going already," and he let himself take a deep breath and _really_ run, gave the demons at his heels a proper workout), and did his best to help out around the house. 

He washed the dishes after every meal. Sam grunted, and pointed at the appliance just to Steve's right.

"Dishwasher," he'd said, but seemed to recognize a losing battle when he saw one. 

He mopped the floors and scrubbed the bathrooms and dusted the shelves.

"You got a problem with the way I keep house, Rogers?" Sam had demanded when he'd caught him, duster in hand. He didn't seem too offended, even so. Maybe he knew something about creating order out of chaos where you could. Probably, Steve thought.

The time Sam came home from his work at the VA to find Steve folding Sam's underwear fresh from the dryer proved to be his breaking point, though. He'd made an undignified squawk and snatched the boxer briefs from Steve's hands. 

"You need something to do, Rogers. Something that doesn't involve my underwear." 

There was a brief pause, as if Sam had just heard what he'd said, and Steve thought he might have flushed a little. 

"Pack your lunch pail, you're coming in with me tomorrow. You can make yourself useful, or you can find someone to talk to, I don't care which, but you're not staying here."

____

"Take Your Supersoldier To Work Day," as Sam termed it, actually went pretty well. Steve hadn't really learned the layout of the complex on his last visit, so he spent the morning just wandering around. He passed the time of day with some grizzled old veterans smoking in a garden, until a nurse came out to chase them away from the windows. "Vietnam," they'd said, when he asked where they served.

A flash of metal caught his eye, on the way back inside, and he turned to see a young man walking slowly by on a sleek-looking prosthesis. The limb didn't look like a leg, not really, but Steve couldn't tear his eyes away. It seemed only polite to introduce himself, after staring so rudely, but Lt. Phelps was nice about it. Steve found himself invited along for the lieutenant's PT.

Physical Therapy turned out to be a big room full of ramps and stairs and parallel bars. There were weight machines, giant rubber balls, odd contraptions Steve couldn't begin to name. Physical Therapy was also full of soldiers — and this was the part that made Steve want to walk right back out the door. 

These soldiers weren't whole. They were bandaged and scarred, pale and sweaty with effort. They wobbled and limped, like broken toys some careless child had cast back into the box. Everywhere, there was the glint and gleam of metal hinges where flesh joints should be, and the dull sheen of plastic in place of skin. Steve tasted bile rising in the back of his throat. 

This wasn't the place or the time, though, so Steve straightened his spine and began to circle the room, to help where he could. He shook hands and posed for pictures, when he was asked, but he also helped a young soldier with only one arm practice tying her shoelaces. He tossed a ball back and forth with a Marine who was working on stability, and joined the cheering squad for a brain-injured soldier just trying his first steps. Every one, he thanked them for their service. It wasn't enough, but it was something.

None of them had a fully articulated metal hand. On balance, Steve thought that was probably for the best.

____

The VA complex wasn't pleasant, just a mismatched collection of shabby buildings in government concrete, but the courtyard garden was nice. Steve sat on a bench after the PT session to get a breath of air. If he closed his eyes and tilted his face into the sun, if he tuned out the voices and the city noise —

Someone sat on the bench beside him. Steve tensed, and allowed himself a moment of frantic self-recrimination at his laxity before he opened his eyes. 

The person on the bench beside him wasn't anyone he knew. She was middle-aged and careworn, dressed in the same kind of low-level-government business suit everyone else wore. Her hands were empty, and her face, what he could see of it, was kind. She had tilted her head back to catch the sun, as Steve had, and the skin of her eyelids looked soft and delicate.

Steve just sat a moment, unsure what to do. He didn't think soaking up sunshine and solitude was normally a group activity. On the other hand, this _was_ a free country. He had just begun to shift his weight to rise, find another bench, when the woman spoke.

"It's nice to just enjoy the silence sometimes. Feels like all I do all day is talk, you know?" Still she kept her eyes closed and her face turned to the sun.

Steve hesitated. 

"I don't think I do, ma'am. Everybody's always talking at me, but I can't ever think of a blessed thing to say in return." It was maybe more truthful than he meant to be, to this stranger sharing his park bench.

She snorted a little huff of laughter through her nose. 

"That's a good song."

"I'm sorry?"

"Harry Nilsson. "[Everybody's Talkin'](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE)." It's a good song; you should look it up."

"I'll add it to my list," Steve said, and did so.

"Do you feel like you should be talking, then?" the woman asked, as Steve was putting his notebook away.

"...Yeah. Probably. It's what you're supposed to do now, right? Talk about your problems?"

"It does seem to be the done thing." She smiled, faintly, but did not otherwise move. "And do you have someone to talk to?"

It was Steve's turn to snort. "Yeah. Problem is, the only person I _want_ to talk to is —" he swallowed involuntarily around the word he'd been about to say — "gone."

"Well, that's easy enough," and the woman's smile turned bitter at the same time Steve's did. "Write them a letter. Power of the written word, and all that. It's a classic for a reason."

Steve sat back and let himself think about that. He thought about dust settling, and about clearing the air, if only in his own head. He thought so long he almost didn't notice when the woman stood to go.

"Thank you for letting me share your bench, Captain," she said, and walked off without waiting for a reply. She was headed for the building where Sam worked, and Steve could see an ID badge clipped to her pocket, but it was too far away for him to read. Belatedly, he realized he should probably say something, but the words swirling in his mind were for hello, not goodbye.

_Dear Bucky..._

____

He wrote different things every time. 

At first, they'd just been regular letters, like he'd have written Bucky when he was still in Brooklyn and Buck was out on the front.

> _Dear Bucky,  
>  I hope this letter reaches you okay. I'm doing great, old Mrs. Wells from next door gave me a bunch of her homegrown vegetables in exchange for some drawings I did, so I'm actually eating pretty well right now. Without you here to supervise, I bet my cooking wouldn't even stack up against the old C-rations, though, so you're well out of it. The weather here continues fine..._

Only he never did write Bucky on the front, first because there wasn't time, and then because he couldn't ever think of anything that wouldn't sound completely ridiculous.

Or he could, plenty of it, and that was the problem, because he wasn't brave enough to say any of it to Bucky's face, let alone in a letter. Writing it down would make it _real_ , too, something that couldn't be laughed off or taken back. And if someone else found it, and read what Steve had to say...

Well. It had been better not to write at all. Bucky probably had plenty of girls writing him, anyway.

Except this wasn't then, and nobody else missed Bucky any more, and nobody would ever read these letters.

> _Dear Bucky,  
>  You know how long I made it without you before I did something suicidally dumb? Less than a week, pal. And then I woke up in the future and it turned out even that plan hadn't worked out too well, and the future is awful. Too shiny. Not shiny enough, I don't know. I wasn't as happy as I should have been to be alive again, I could tell by the looks on everyone's faces, and did you know they have drugs for that, now? They don't work on me. Ask me how I know._
> 
> _So I've been in the future for a while now, and let me tell you, the best thing about it is that you're in it. Even if you are a brainwashed, traumatized, ex-Soviet HYDRA-run assassin who tried to kill me. Which is, wow, Buck —_

The pen snapped. Steve realized, too late, he'd been clenching his hands into fists. He made himself set the pieces down, deliberately, and wiped the ink on his fingers onto a corner of the already-ruined page. Tomorrow.

He'd try again tomorrow.

____

It was supposed to be just one letter. Then one every day or so, just when Steve had something interesting to say. It didn't work, though. Before the war, Steve had always liked talking to Bucky, and now, now that he'd been given _permission_ —

The letters lost their signoffs and salutations. They picked up halfway through a thought, like an old conversation rejoined. They became fractured, disjointed entries of a pillowbook Steve never knew he'd always wanted to write. Letters to Bucky became the first thing Steve did every morning, and the last thing each night. 

Steve woke gasping, more often than not. The nightmares were nothing new, but lately they all contained the same face, same as all his waking hours. There'd been a figure vanishing, diminishing from sight behind swirling billows of snow. 

Or was it smoke? Too late, too late.

Steve turned on his lamp and reached for a pen.

> _I'm so sorry, Bucky. I'm sorry I didn't reach you in time_
> 
> _sorry I didn't go back to look for you_
> 
> _sorry for what they did to you_
> 
> _sorry I had to hurt you_
> 
> _sorry I didn't know_
> 
> _sorry I asked you to stay. They would have sent you home, I think, after Azzano, but I don't know how to be me without you, I'm so sorry_
> 
> _I'm sorry I'm glad you're back._

____

If Steve were prone to magical thinking —

(He had to take a moment to laugh at himself just there, because he was a nonagenarian _supersoldier_ who sometimes palled around with a rage monster and a Norse god, who was he to say anything about magical thinking?)

If Steve were prone to magical thinking, he would imagine the words of his letters somehow transmuting, flying invisible and sure to wherever Bucky might be, finding a home with him. There was a comfort in the thought.

Steve ran the first few letters through the shredder in Sam's office, and pictured the words they contained being broken up into similar bits. He thought they might be cut up small enough to whiz though the air like how television worked in that one strange movie about chocolate Natasha made him watch. (He thought that was a pretty good explanation for it, actually, all that information whirling about them in invisible clouds.) 

It wasn't as satisfying as he'd thought it would be, to see his letters cut up by so many hidden blades. The machine whirred on, turning each page into confetti in a gentle shower of white.

____

Some days, he wrote a journal, a kind of transcription of his inner monologue. The language wasn't good, those days, half-phrases and sentence fragments interrupted by quick sketches or little doodles. 

> _I just can't figure out Sam's coffeemaker, Buck. Or at least, that's what I let him think. The truth is, he's kind of hilarious before he's had his coffee. He makes this face_
> 
> _**[a rough pencil sketch of Sam looking simultaneously confused, suspicious and disappointed]** _
> 
> _and he stumbles around bumping into things. To be fair, it's a damn sight more complicated than our_
> 
> _**[miniature drawing of an[old, battered aluminum coffeepot](http://www.laurelleaffarm.com/pages/kitchen&table/wear-ever-coffee-pot.htm#.U5lVJ9q9KSM)]**_
> 
> _but coffee doesn't do anything for me these days anyway, same as beer doesn't._
> 
> _Sam is Serious about his beer. He keeps bringing home all these fancy microbrews and making me try them. They're okay, I guess, but you'd like 'em more than me. I like the art on the labels, though:_
> 
> _**[a lovingly rendered full-color copy of the label from[Southern Tier's Gemini Ale](https://justbeer.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/imperial-gemini1.gif?w=400&h=603)] **_

It reminded Steve of how they had used to talk to each other. All those years in each other's pockets, they didn't need need fancy words to get the point across. Their conversations had been a mélange of slang and gesture, references and in-jokes. 

Steve wondered how many of those old in-jokes were left in Bucky's scarred brain.

____

He burned the next bundle of letters. Sam had a pretty good scented candle collection, so it wasn't hard to find matches. The familiar hiss and flare of the match lighting felt right, in this context, and Steve got lost a little, thinking about hands cupping a flame somewhere dark, where they mustn't be seen —

The match burned down to scorch his fingers, and Steve dropped it hurriedly in the sink. The second match fulfilled its purpose: he applied it to the bottom corner of the bundle and watched the flame grow and leap from that small beginning. The paper thinned, blackened, curled, and flaked away, as if it had aged a hundred years in just a few seconds. Tiny bright embers rose from that failing edge and spiraled up to join the twisting smoke.

Steve wondered if the smoke knew what it carried. He wondered who would breathe his words in; if they'd know, too.

____

Some days, Steve didn't write at all. That was disingenuous, though — every thought that ran through his head felt like part of one long, unwritten letter to Bucky. More accurate to say instead that some days the words came out as pictures. Steve bundled whole pages of his sketchbook along with the letters, because some things were just easier to say that way.

> _[The view as Steve remembered it from the top of the Ferris wheel at Coney Island.]_
> 
> _[Bucky peering at him over the top of his sniper rifle's scope.]_
> 
> _[The old building where they'd lived for a year or so before the war. It's condos and a "vintage" record store and an H &R Block, now, but it's still the same building, underneath.]_
> 
> _[The kindness in Peggy's face, in the bombed-out bar on that horrible night after Bucky fell.]_
> 
> _[Bucky in his uniform on the night before he shipped out, looking equal parts proud and afraid.]_
> 
> _[Bucky's hands.]_
> 
> _[Bucky's eyes.]_
> 
> _[Bucky's curly, close-lipped smile.]_

Everywhere Steve looked, Bucky.

____

The third bunch of letters Steve tore into shreds himself. It felt like labor, if a small one, a kind of blessing in the destruction with his own hands. Methodically he tore the pages in half, then half again. Each division left the pieces a little smaller, a little harder for his overlarge fingers to hold. After just a few minutes he was down to close work, and he had to squint in the poor light to rend each tiny scrap individually.

They made no sense at all at that size: each piece held a just single letter or a disjointed sequence of lines. Still, Steve would know the corner of Bucky's smile anywhere. The "u" of Bucky's name did not look the same as a "u" in any other context. 

"Get a grip, Rogers," he muttered aloud when the scraps were torn too small for him to hold. Then he laughed at himself, there in the dark, and tossed the flurry of paper out the window to help the flowers grow.

____

> _The thing is, Buck, I would have gotten over you. Well, no, not really, but I would have moved on. Everybody always sees the "seventy years" part of the story, but they forget it's only been two years and change for me. I would have gone on living. I was getting there._
> 
> _I met a guy in the park. He was charming, and funny. We had some stuff in common. I thought, **maybe**... But then someone tried to kill my boss twice in one day, and it turned out to be you. Talk about timing, huh? I don't know whether to be grateful or pissed off. I guess I'm both. _
> 
> _I was right, Sam is great. He's letting me sleep at his place because there's blood all over mine. He's being patient and listening and he fought beside me for no other reason than I asked. (You might remember him. He had wings.) Him and Natasha both. Natasha, the redhead? She never comes right out and says anything, but I get the impression you two knew each other at some point. Just a few weeks ago Sam was a stranger and Nat was a not-totally-trustworthy colleague, and now they're my friends. I don't really know what to do with that._
> 
> _Just a few weeks ago I was drowning, lost and all alone in a strange land. Now it turns out I've been working for the enemy, and my best friend isn't dead and tried to murder me, and I'm okay with it. Stupid, I can hear you say, but at least now I know what my mission is._
> 
> _I wish I knew where you were. I think they're probably hunting you. I hope you're safe._

____

Natasha appeared at Sam's breakfast table one morning and about gave Sam a heart attack. If he'd known they were going to have company, Steve thought, Sam would have put on a shirt.

Or maybe not. He was doing an awful lot of stretching on his way to the coffeepot.

Natasha and Sam had some kind of nonverbal argument over the Cheerios, which culminated in Natasha announcing that she had custody of Steve for the day, and that they were going shopping. Steve opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it.

Natasha wouldn't answer any questions on the way to the mall. She looked different, but good. She'd done something to her hair.

"Is Natasha even your name anym— I mean, what do you go by now?"

She rolled her eyes at him.

The mall wasn't like any shopping trip he'd had before. Okay, so SHIELD had bought his clothes for him ("That explains the grandpa pants," Natasha had snorted), and his last visit to a mall hadn't really been for shopping... Still. He didn't think most people shopped like this.

Natasha was apparently shopping for a new cover. Possibly several covers, if the quantity and variety were anything to go by. She walked into a chosen store, pulled an armful of clothes off the rack, and threw down a credit card. Steve caught a glimpse at one point, and the name on the card wasn't anything _like_ Natasha.

Steve, on the other hand, was required to try everything on. And then to model it for Natasha, and whatever flustered saleswoman she had connived into doing her bidding. 

"I have plenty of clothes," he'd tried at the first store.

Natasha arched one eyebrow.

"Grandpa pants," she'd repeated, and shoved him into a dressing room with several pairs of jeans that seemed much too small.

____

> _Natasha keeps trying to set me up. I keep trying to fob her off. She's very persistent._
> 
> _I told her it was difficult to find people with "shared life experiences," which is true, but it's more than that — there aren't that many people that see **me** any more, Bucky. I'm a symbol, shined and polished, and there's nothing approachable about that. _
> 
> _It would only end in disappointment, anyway. **You** know I snore when I sleep on my side, and that I can be mean when I'm hungry. Hardly anyone else does, though. I've heard a lot about the "honor and burden" of my shield, but the heaviest thing I'll ever carry is other people's expectations._
> 
> _So I'm writing to you. It's awful, putting this on you, because you didn't ask for it and you can't talk back, but there you go. I want to find you, and **help** you, but I don't think I'm in any shape to, because all I've ever known how to do is lean on you._

____

One unforeseen benefit of the supersoldier serum, it turned out, was the ability to carry lots and lots of shopping bags. Natasha parked Steve in the food court behind a veritable fortress of logo-ed bags with itchy twine handles, and reappeared a few minutes later bearing two confections the size of her head.

"Cinnabon," she said by way of explanation, shoving one toward him and forking it quite violently in its frosted heart. "It's kinda like you: four times the calories of a normal bon. Eat."

Steve did, watching in bemusement as Natasha peeled and ate her own Cinnabon without, as far as he could see, getting frosting on her anywhere. She passed him a wad of napkins to aid him in his own progress.

_These are everything that's wrong with the future,_ he imagined telling Bucky. _Or possibly everything that's right. You'd love 'em._

A flash of metal caught the corner of Steve's eye. Slowly, casually, he shifted his gaze over Natasha's shoulder and to the right, but nothing was there. He must have tensed up, though, because Nat quirked an eyebrow at him in silent question; he shrugged back. It was probably nothing.

It was probably nothing.

____

> _I thought I saw you in the mall today. There was something metallic, shining through the crowds, and for a second I thought —_
> 
> _Well, if I'm telling the truth here, I see you all the time._
> 
> _I go running in the park, and I look for you. Anyone with your build, your shade of hair, I have this awful moment of hope/fear, and then I pass them by and they're not you. Heavy bootsteps make me think of you, too, even though you were never noisy when you walked. And I'm always seeing that metal arm of yours, glinting in the corner of my eye._
> 
> _Sometimes I can convince myself I'm only seeing what is there, that you really are dogging me from bus stops and empty rooftops. I think maybe you've made yourself my shadow... But then I close my eyes and I still see you, just the same._
> 
> _I'm headed for a fall here, Buck, and I know it. I can't keep on like this. Soon there'll be a breakdown, or a resolution, I can't see which one. Everything is swirling together, like snow or smoke or blood in the water, and I just can't see..._

____

Natasha knocked twice on the open door to Steve's bedroom (technically, Sam's home office) and then leaned against the doorframe. She looked relaxed there, and Steve could still hear the sounds of Sam vs. the dishwasher in the kitchen, so he finished his sentence before looking up.

When he did catch her eye, Natasha gave Steve a small half-smile before throwing his jacket at his face. 

"Come on, Cap. It's a nice night. You fellas are taking me to a movie."

She had turned to go before he was even halfway out of his chair. "You should wear your new skinny jeans."

Steve thought he heard Sam choke in the kitchen.

Steve stood and stretched, to give himself time to gather his thoughts. Natasha was right, it was a nice night; he'd opened the window to enjoy the breeze. Sam's net curtains billowed and swayed with the movement of the air, and the stack of letters on the sill fluttered, just a little. Steve imagined his words lifting off the page in sinuous lines of ink, rising and wafting along like scent from a fresh-baked pie set down to cool.

He started to reach for them, and then caught his hand. He could hear Sam and Natasha chatting in the living room, waiting for Steve to join them, so he shrugged on his jacket and made for the door.

Just one glance back. Letters on the sill; curtains blowing gently; empty window open onto black.

They would be there when he returned, or they wouldn't.

Steve didn't know which he feared more.

**Author's Note:**

> ...
> 
> Still pretty new to this fic thing. Comments, concrit, suggestions, and offers to beta-read all _enthusiastically_ welcomed.
> 
> Also, my ability to art is sadly limited to stick-figures. If you feel the urge to illustrate all or part of Steve's letters, please do! (And then let me know so I can see.) I will cry real tears of gratitude and love you forever.
> 
> And, of course, you are heartily encouraged to come visit me on [tumblr](http://z-delenda-est.tumblr.com). I have no idea what I'm doing, but more friends are always better. And I really like prompts.


End file.
